Toni Morrison is a Goddess and She Told Me It’s Time for a Girlfriends Movie
Updated: Feb 7
Toni Morrison once dismissed critics labeling Sula a lesbian novel:
“Friendship between women is special, different, and has never been depicted as the major focus of a novel before Sula. Nobody ever talked about friendship between women unless it was homosexual, and there is no homosexuality in Sula.”
Still, Black Feminist Barbara Smith argued, “Sula is an exceedingly lesbian text.” In today’s woke culture, Morrison’s refusal to see Sula as anything but a text about friendship might have gotten her canceled. Sike! You can’t cancel Toni Morrison. Some might have given her the side-eye, though. But Morrison knew that Black women are only allowed to be friends if they are searching for a man or seeking revenge on one. See: “Waiting to Exhale,” “Deliver Us From Eva,” “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” and any other “girlfriends” movie. Shows like “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” “Love and Hip Hop,” all pivot around a group of women nice-nasty enough to travel to Monaco to fight each other in a foreign land. Totally normal, right? All of these shows and movies stack women against each other, gaslighting us in the process. If women find each other insufferable, can we really blame men for mistreating us?
We rarely see Black women tenderly loving on each other. Unless, as Morrison implied, it is through the lens of the erotic. We aren’t talking Audre Lorde’s articulation of the erotic as a life-sustaining force, but that kind of erotic that emphasizes sensation without feeling.
So I was happy to see the Girlfriends cast reunite for a special episode of “Blackish." But not excited. I’m tired of white people exploiting Black women’s emotional labor, which the very white ABC network seemed all too eager to do. That pithy line from Jill-Marie Jones, “No, “we’re your blackups..." I mean...I guess girl. But their reunion reminds us of why Morrison was so hesitant to label the relationship between Nel and Sula romantic: No one seems to care about Black women’s friendship unless we are getting our groove back or muling for white women. The Blackish episode itself wasn’t that memorable. But the interview the cast did with Charlemagne tha God was everything!
Understand, Girlfriends was my show back in the day. My sisters and I were in high school when it premiered in 2000. Every week we tuned in to watch this quartet of fine ass Black women we swore we were going to be when we hit thirty. Successful. Maybe married. Maybe not.
What made Girlfriends refreshing wasn’t Joan’s thirst for a man—she STAYED looking for a man—but that the women seemed to have a genuine respect for each other. No, they weren't all besties and even Joan's and Toni's relationship was fraught with drama. But they knew the value of another's woman company. Their characters weren’t of the cookie-cutter variety either. Remember that episode where the white girl thought she could say nigga and nobody was going to check her? Homegirl said this in a room full of sistas too like her Black card was paid up in full.
Girlfriends even gave us Black mamaspeak. I'll never forget Maya running through every J in the dictionary just to get Jumanji to give her the remote. How in the hell was Maya so confused though? She only had one child. My mom had six so after two attempts she just said, “Child, hand me the remote.”
One of my favorite episodes is the one about colorism. When Toni let Joan know that her lighter skin and curly-but-not-too-nappy-hair gave her privileges that she, a darker skinned woman with full lips could never access, I pictured her as a little Black girl shrinking from insults. God Help the Child.
This Black woman ensemble gave us something more than pithy quotes during their interview. Golden Brooks told us how affirming it was for her, as a darker skinned child growing up, to see Diana Ross in “Mahoghany.” Ellis Ross confirmed that Jones was one of the few people invited to her mother’s house. Of course, there were tears. But not because somebody’s man had been cheating on them. Jones’s unexpected departure from the show left a wound deep enough for the tears to flow a whole eleven years later.
In a touching moment, Ellis Ross tells Jones, “But we needed you, Jill.” When she says this, she sounds like she is pulling from Nel’s pit of pain, belonging, and desire. This desire to be loved, accepted, and nurtured by another woman. It make sense then when Ellis-Ross confirms, “Joan’s big love affair was Toni.” It feels like Ellis Ross is summoning Morrison, insisting that we engage the radical power of Black woman relationships. This radical power looks something like: Jones hating that the script called for her to slap Joan; Ellis Ross laughing so hard in the company of these women that she snorts; Golden Brooks confessing that Ellis Ross was the first person she called when she found out she was pregnant; Persia White looking at her ring when Ellis Ross says that marriage isn't the goal (LMAO I love her off-centered self). “That’s my girl," Brooks says of telling Ellis Ross about her pregnancy, "I wanted to share that with her.” Here, girl is more than a word. A bond. A title. A love supreme.
When Sula dies, the 55-year-old Nell realizes that she has missed out on Sula’s companionship, saying, “‘All that time, all that time, I thought I was missing Jude.’” Inseparable as girls, Sula and Nel become estranged after Sula sleeps with Jude, Nel’s husband. The weight of Nel’s sorrow presses down on her chest and the cry that escapes her throat calls out for Sula in that tender way us Black women affirm each other without mentioning names, “girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.” In conversations with each other, we pull girl out like Master P pulling CDs out the trunk of his car in the 90s. Girl. Girl. GIRL. We need our girl to feel us. Support us. See us. Ellis-Ross knew that she could only handle "well-intentioned" racist white women if she called on her girls. She knew what Morrison always knew:
Life without women loving on other women ain’t a life worth living at all.
Toni Morrison is a goddess and she told me to tell y’all that it’s time for a Girlfriends movie.
#tonimorrison #girlfriends #sula